Diversity combining in wireless relay networks with partial channel state information

We develop a novel diversity combiner for joint reception in wireless relay networks with unknown relay-to-destination channel. The partially available channel information poses an obstacle for utilization of the relay diversity. We tackle this problem by formulating a unified second-order cone programming (SOCP) receiver which jointly detects and decodes transmitted signals from both source and relay nodes. Our results demonstrate that the proposed diversity combiners can achieve performance close to that of the maximum-ratio combiner based on full channel information.